Salena Zito: What a Hillary Clinton Presidency Will Look Like

If the election were held today Hillary Clinton would win comfortably based on the RealClearPolitics poll averages of the battleground states needed to reach the 270 electoral college votes to win the presidential election.

After a month of leaked audio tapes of comments bragging about kissing and groping women and multiple women alleging Donald J. Trump groped them, the Republican candidate has fallen from the tie he enjoyed with Clinton in the beginning of September.

Both conservative supporters and non-supporters of Trump -- including Democrats who are weary of the Clinton name -- have dreaded the possibility of a Clinton presidency for eight years. However, it is worth taking a look at what kind of president she might be, including everything from temperament to cabinet appointment to agenda.

Hillary has been bashed during this campaign for having a somewhat calculated air about her and Alison Dagnes, a political science professor at Shippensburg University, expects this kind of careful temperament to continue.

"But I would argue that this is not a bad thing: One might want to leader of the free world, the most important elected official in the nation, to have a calm demeanor," she said.

According to Danges, Clinton is very smart and does her homework, which means that she will approach varying situations with a collected manner.

"Since she has served for four years as our chief diplomat, she obviously has the skills to be tactful and polite, which is important on the world stage," she added.

Given the nastiness this campaign dove into on the onset, one wonders if Clinton would consider placing a Republican in her cabinet to help heal the wounds between both the GOP and a divided country.

Hillary has run this campaign with a certain vision of bipartisanship, said Dagnes.

"When she had the opportunity to bash GOP leaders along with her opponent, she did not, which signaled to me that she was interested in working with Republicans in the future," she said.

Additionally, her husband had Republicans in his cabinet, as did President Barack Obama, which set the precedent for bipartisan staffing in the executive branch.

There might be some wisdom to this.

Not only would it help soften the narrative that Clinton is a polarizing figure, but if the best person for the job is a Republican, it would be foolish to set that person aside in the name of party politics.

There are 15 cabinet secretaries and dozens more agency leaders -- she has space to fill and knows she needs to get these openings filled correctly.

For the Republicans who are weary of Democrats being able to pitch the country left with policies and regulations, a further slide left with the Clinton agenda has been their biggest fear.

It is easy to imagine Clinton going for economic uplifts such as raising the minimum wage and furthering climate change and education issues such as "affordable college."

While Clinton has already said she needs to fix the problems with the healthcare system as it stands now, she needs to have congress working with her, and not against her.

This, according to Dagnes, will be a pretty big problem after the mess the GOP is in.

"Speaker Ryan has to contend with a very fiery Freedom Caucus that is out for his head, and no matter who wins control of the Senate, the majorities will be slim," she said.

Clinton’s agenda is severely limited because Congress already has its eye on the 2018 midterms and the GOP has absolutely no incentive to give her a single victory.

Additionally, since she comes to the office with existing baggage -- she was disliked by the Republicans well before she ran for anything -- it will be especially difficult for her to pass a full agenda through.

"That said, she is one very hard working person and will try as best she can to win over her opponents," said Dagnes.

For Clinton to become the president-elect in two weeks, the best thing that could happen for both her and the country is a big win over Trump.

Clinton will need to keep Trump somewhere in the range of under 35 percentage points.

That could be enough to scare the foolishness off of the Freedom Caucus so that Republicans can go into a Clinton administration united – an opportunity to have laws that have a balance from both sides of the aisle.

If the election were held today Hillary Clinton would win comfortably based on the RealClearPolitics poll averages of the battleground states needed to reach the 270 electoral college votes to win the presidential election.